Expressive Portrait in Watercolor: Light, Color and Abstract Freedom

1. Welcome To The Class!: Hello, everyone. My name is Will Elliston. And today, we're going to paint an expressive portrait that combines carefully observed details with loose abstract passages. The face and striking blue eyes provide a clear vocal point, while the hair and surrounding space dissolve into flowing washes, splashes, drips, and gestural marks. We'll explore how warm ochres and earthy browns can balance cooler turquoise blues and how untouched paper creates light and freshness throughout the composition. This class is about knowing where to be precise and where to let go, allowing control and spontaneity to support one another. I've been a professional artist for many years, exploring lots of different subjects from wildlife and portraits to cityscapes and countryside scenes. I've always been entranced by the possibilities of watercolor. But when I started, I had no idea where to begin or how to improve. I didn't know what supplies I needed, how to create the effects I wanted, or which colors to mix. Now I've taken part in many worldwide exhibitions, been featured in magazines, and been lucky enough to win awards from well respected organizations such as the International Watercolor Society, the Masters of Watercolor Alliance, Windsor and Newton, and the SAA. Watercolor can be overwhelming for those starting out, which is why my goal is to help you feel relaxed and enjoy this medium in a step by step manner. Today, I'll be guiding you through a complete painting, demonstrating a variety of techniques, and explaining how I use all my supplies and materials. Whether you're just starting out or already have some experience, you'll be able to follow along at your own pace and improve your watercolor skills. If this class is too challenging or too easy for you, I have a variety of classes available at different skill levels. I like to start off with a free expressive approach with no fear of making mistakes as we create exciting textures for the underlayer. As the painting progresses, we'll add more details to bring it to life and make it stand out. I strive to simplify complex subjects into easier shapes that encourage playfulness. Throughout this class, I'll be sharing plenty of tips and tricks. I'll show you how to turn mistakes into opportunities, taking the stress out of painting in order to have fun. I'll also provide you with my watercolor mixing charts, which are an invaluable tool when it comes to choosing and mixing colors. If you have any questions, you can post them in the discussion thread down below. I'll be sure to read and respond to everything you post. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking the Follow button at the top. This means you'll be the first to know when I launch a new class or post giveaways. You can also follow me on Instagram at Will Elliston to see my latest works. So, let's get started and explore the exciting space between portraiture and abstraction. 2. Your Project: Thank you so much for joining today's class. I really appreciate it. This portrait is a great opportunity to explore contrast in more ways than one. Realism against abstraction, warm color against cool, and crisp detail against soft disappearing edges. The eyes, the central features give the painting structure while the surrounding shapes remain open, expressive and full of movement. Hair can become sweeping lines and translucent washes. Clothing can dissolve into broad color, and drips or splats can add energy without needing to describe anything literally. The aim is not to finish every area equally, but to create a compelling balance between clarity, suggestion and the natural freedom of watercolor. In the resource section, I've added a high resolution image of my finished painting to help guide you. You're welcome to follow my painting exactly or experiment with your own composition. As we're going to be focusing on the painting aspect of watercolor, I've provided templates you can use to help transfer or trace the sketch before you paint. It's fine to trace when using it as a guide for learning how to paint. It's important to have the underdrawing correct so that you can relax and have fun learning the watercolor medium itself. Whichever direction you take this class, it would be great to see your results and the paintings you create through it. I love giving my students feedback, so please take a photo afterwards and share it in the student project gallery under the Project and resource tab. I'm always intrigued to see how many students have different approaches and how they progress with each class. I'd love to hear about your process and what you learned along the way, or if you had any difficulties. I strongly recommend that you take a look at each other's work in the student project gallery. It's so inspiring to see each other's work and extremely comforting to get the support of your fellow students. So don't forget to like and comment on each other's work. 3. Materials & Supplies: Before we start this port rat, let's go over all the materials and supplies you'll need to paint along. Having the right materials can greatly impact the outcome of your artwork. So I'll go over all the supplies I use for this class and beyond. They're very useful to have at your disposal and we'll make it easier for you to follow along. Let's start with the paints themselves. And like most of the materials we'll be using today, it's a lot to do with preference. I have 12 stable colors in my palette that I fill up from tubes. They are cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, cadmium red, Alizarin crimson, Opramarne blue, cobalt blue, serlean blue, lavender, purple, Vidian, black, and at the end of the painting, I often use white gouache for tiny highlights. I don't use any particular brand. These colors you can get from any brand, although I personally use Daniel Smith, Windsor and Newton, or Holbein paints. So let's move on to brushes. The brush I use the most is a synthetic round brush like this scodaPurl brush or this Van Gogh brush. They're very versatile because not only can you use them for detailed work with their fine tip, but as they can hold a lot of water, they are good for washers as well. They're also quite affordable, so I have quite a few in different sizes. Next are the mop brushes. Mop brushes are good for broad brush strokes, filling in large areas and creating smooth transitions or washes. They also have a nice tip that can be used for smaller details. But for really small details, highlights or anything that needs more precision, I use a synthetic size zero brush. All brands have them, and they're super cheap. Another useful brush to have is a Chinese calligraphy brush. They tend to have long bristles and a very pointy tip. They're perfect for adding texture or creating dynamic lines in your paintings. You can even fan them out like this to achieve fur or feather textures as well. And that's it for brushes. Onto paper. The better quality of your paper, the easier it will be to paint. Cheap paper criinkles easily and is very unforgiving, not allowing you to rework mistakes. It's harder to create appealing effects and apply useful techniques like rubbing away pigment. Good quality paper, however, such as cotton based paper, not only allows you to rework mistakes multiple times, but because the pigment reacts much better on it, the chances of mistakes are a lot lower and you'll be more likely to create better paintings. I use archers paper because that's what's available in my local art shop. A water spray is absolutely essential. By using this, it gives you more time to paint the areas you want before it dries. It also allows you to reactivate the paint if you want to add a smooth line or remove some paint. I also have an old rag or t shirt which I use to clean my brush. Cleaning off the paint before dipping it in the water will make the water last a lot longer. It's always useful to have a tissue at hand whilst painting to lift off excess paint. Also, you never know when an unwanted splash or drip might occur that needs wiping away quickly. I also have a water dropper to keep the paints wet. When you paint, it's important to have them a similar consistency to what they're like in the tubes. This way, it's easier to pick up sufficient pigment. A hair dryer is useful to have for speeding up the drying time and controlling the dampness of the paper. And lastly, masking tape. And this, of course, is just to hold the paper down still onto the surface to stop it sliding around whilst painting. Also, if you plan on painting to the edge, we'll allow you to create a very crisp, clean border. And that's everything you'll need to follow along in today's portrait class. I encourage you to experiment with whatever colors or materials you want to play along with. Now let's sketch out this portrait before we paint it. 4. Preparing The Composition: Drawing a portrait facing forward like this is actually one of the easiest portraits we can do. It's still not necessarily easy, but out of all the different angles, we can break it down into familiar proportions. So I add that center line vertical right in the middle, and then I break it down into thirds. So the very top is obviously the top of the forehead. The third down is the eyebrows, and then another third down is the bottom of the nose, and then that final third is the bottom of the chin. So that's roughly how we break down the face into thirds. And then from the very top the forehead to the bottom of the chin, halfway roughly halfway is where the eyes are. And then, of course, we can use the center line for balance and Smetricty. So I use a very soft pencil, a lead pencil to mark out roughly where these proportions are before I go in with this finer lead pencil to add a bit of definition to where the lines are, where I want there to be hard lines in this painting. I don't really add pencil lines to the soft transitions. Or if I do, I make sure it's very light so that we don't see that on the paper. And then I'm going to use a rubber to rub away all these construction lines that are quite rough underneath. And I'll go back and forth testing it to get a feeling of the likeness because it might look right now, but if I disconnect for 5 minutes, I'll see my errors a bit clearer. I'm not drawing out the abstract areas. I'll do that spontaneously with a watercolor later. Unlike painting landscapes, which can be quite adaptable and spontaneous with the painting process. With a portrait, we really have to make sure the drawing is correct, please use my template. 5. Blue Eyes: In this portrait class, I think I'm going to start with the eyes and there's no real reason for this. We can start with so many different things. I could leave the eyes to last if I wanted to. If you've seen my other portrait classes, you may in fact have seen that. The reason I'm starting now is because the eyes are the thing that really grab the attention straightaway. If you're slightly uncomfortable with the painting process, especially the ugly stage that we'll go through, just having those eyes added in there to begin with, at least the blue underlayer of the eyes. We're not adding that much detail yet. I'm using serlean blue for this. Straight out the tube actually. Just by adding these irises in there, I find it already gives it a grounding sensation. It gives it a bit of context. Painting a portrait when it's eyeless can just feel a bit off. It's not necessarily a problem with the painting itself. That's why there's so many ugly stages, what feels like an ugly stage in a painting because there's important elements, but we're not seeing it yet. I'm using a bit of a wet on wet technique with this eye. In the center of it, it's quite light then around the outside, I'm dabbing in stronger pigment, which you can see is blending in naturally because of the wet nature of the paper. I'm trying not to agitate it that much, just encouraging it a bit. The reason I've gone with blue, even though the multiple references I found didn't actually have blue when I find references, I kind of make a big mosaic of them, so to speak, compilation. I don't find just one reference photo and directly, I have about five different ones, and maybe I'm following the lips from one, the hairstyle from the other, the eyes from another one, the general pose, the light, the shadow. And to be honest, after drawing so many portraits, I can kind of invent my own elements. So the references are just a very basic part of it. So often people want me to share the reference that I'm following as if I'm just following direct one reference, but it's not the case. It's highly inventive and it's not so faithful to one particular reference. So I finished with the eyes for the time being, and I'm using a large brush just to completely wet all the skin area. So I'm leaving the hair dry and everywhere there's skin, including around the eyes, not the eyes themselves, but around the eyes. I'm just giving a light layer of water. I'm going to go all the way down the neck, the shoulders because we're going to start to apply a very light layer, underlayer of the skin tones. Wetting the paper before, like I've said many times in other classes, it just gives us a smooth transition, low pressure. It lowers the stakes for us because if we go direct onto dry paper, it's intimidating. 6. Face Underlayer: So the classic skin tones that I use are alizarin crimson, burnt sienna and yellow ochre. So we've got a red, we've got a brown and a yellow, basically. And then I'm using a bit of blue just for the shading rather than using black. Using blue, I find makes portraits feel a bit more soulful, a bit more alive than just a bland black. And then from those colors, we kind of just turn the dials a bit. Maybe we want a bit more red, maybe we want a bit more burnt sienna. So starting off at the top, it's like a pinkish brown. It's very it starts off with that single kind of warm brown color. But then we can drop other elements in to make it a bit more exciting. I'm thinking about the tone. It's not a flat wash, so the light is coming from the right hand side, so that's going to mean there's shadows on the left and it's going to be a bit lighter on the right hand side. You can see already there slight lightness on the right hand side and darkness on the left. I hope I got my left and right correct just then, but you can see on the screen basically where I'm subtly making bits lighter and a bit darker. Also, the eyelids, I'm basically leaving out for the time being because I'll be going over those with darker pigment later. I don't care too much about the edges at the moment. One thing I will say, when adding this first layer, I want to keep it nice and smooth. Within the wash, there's not many hard edges at all. The only hard edges are the outline, the outskirts where it meets the hair or the cheek or the eyelids. And because we pre wet the paper before, we can get nice soft transitions. If you find your paper is starting to dry, you can just add a bit more pure water like I am right now to increase it. Like I say, one of the important things about this stage that can get beginners or even intermediate painters off guard is painting too light at this stage. I know, every student has their own particularities. Some students go too dark. But for me, I found I was always very hesitant by applying pigments, and I think generally a lot of students are more on the lighter side than the heavy handed side. And you look at this painting as it is now, and you might think it's a bit odd. It's a bit dark. It's like she's glowing or got a bit of sunburn, even. But I guarantee that once we've painted the hair around it, the shadows, this might even look a bit too light once we've added the other darks in there. So now we've added that warmth in there, whilst it's saying wet on wet. I've added that blue mix at the top, but that blue mixed with a brown has turned into a gray all by itself. But on this left hand side, I do want to emphasize a bit more of that blue call tone to contrast with that warmth. There's a kind of motif going on with that blue, the blue of the eye, the blue of the shadow, and I'm going to use blue for a lot of the expressive marks later on. I got an impulse to add a bit of bright red, Alizarin crimson. You can use opera pink too. I'm saying red as a general statement. So you don't need to use specifically Elizarin crimson or cabium red or opera pink, whatever falls into that family of hues. Likewise with the brown and the yellow, maybe you want to use cabium yellow instead of yellow ochre. 7. Neck & Shoulder: So I know I've painted it as if the head is separate from the neck because there's a hard line you can see from the chin, the jaw, and the neck that I'm painting now. Also notably, the neck is a bit browner. There's a bit more burnt sienna in this mix than the face that's a bit more pink. But despite that, it doesn't matter because the face is little wet. I'm going to paint straight over it and make a seamless transition. So when it comes to painting yourself, remember that I'm not allowing the face to dry before I paint the neck. I don't want any hard lines where they're not intended. That's why I do suggest, and I think a lot of students have found it useful following this advice is to watch the video, the painting, the class, the whole way through to begin with, because a lot of the things that I'm doing, first of all, I change my mind on things as the painting goes about and evolves, and so I might say something that I'm doing at the moment and then completely contradict it later on because of the context of the painting. But also, I'm setting things up now that might not make sense until you see it later on. If you're following along painting without watching the whole thing first, you might be doing something without realizing the intention behind it. So just seeing the full thing. And I have slightly sped up the footage to try and get into that hour and a half mark, it's it's about an hour and a quarter of actual painting time sped up. But seeing that sped up footage can sometimes make it easier to understand the process because if it's very slow, it's hard to see how the water blends. But when it's sped up, you can see the kind of areas that I'm allowing to blend before moving on. I hope that makes sense. It's only slightly sped up. You will notice the shoulder area. I allowed a bit of a hard edge where the neck gets darker at the bottom and the shoulder has that hard edge there. I'm using a tissue and scrolling it up into a little point and just dabbing little highlights out. 8. Nose Highlights: So now I've completely dried that with the hair dryer, like I just did in the previous lesson, using the napkin or tissue to bring some of the whiteness of the paper. On this edge of the shoulder, where it was white, I'm adding a bit of blue there. You have to make sure it's white because if the blue goes on top of the orange skin tone, it'll just look gray, which is not the end of the world, but I'm trying to emphasize this blue orange contrast. Moving on to the nose here, I'm pre wetting areas around the highlights. It looks like I'm pre wetting the whole area, but it's not. I've indicated with a pencil where I want there to be some highlights. I painted around that and I'm now dropping in red pigment, zarin crimson pigment, cool red, not a warm red. A warm red could be more of a yellowish orange red. This is more of a purplish, pinkish red, and that's the purple that I want for the nose because once you understand anatomy a bit better, you'll recognize which areas of the face, the facial features gather the blood, the capillary. The nose is generally a bit more red than the forehead and of course, the lips are usually red. So I'm bringing that wetness down to the bottom of the nose where the nostrils is. And I'm using a fairly small brush to blend out these edges so there's no hard edges apart from those highlighted areas. 9. Nose Shadow: Pre wetting the left eyebrow so that when I drop in this burnt sienna, it doesn't have a hard line. It's got a soft edge to it. This is underlayer. There's not much detail in this. This is just simplifying the shape and softening the edge out even more really. Dropping in some muted tones on the right hand side of it. I'm finding it's too vibrant. So I'm just using a tissue to splot it out to take away some of that pigment while it's wet. And also taking the vibrant away by putting a little bit of black in there or neutral tint is what I use. Now I'm going to be quite bold and bring this shadow down from that wet and wet eyebrow. I was quite spontaneous with that shadow colors. I used the clean blue that I had in my palette and mixed it with the brown that I had there and it looks a bit green. Maybe a bit too green, so I have to decide how to deal with that. And that's something that comes up very often in watercolor, being spontaneous and impulsive and correcting and making decisions as you go. So I'm adding a bit of that burnt sienna into there to cancel out some of that greenness to neutralize it a bit. Then at that little tip of the shadow, the tip of the nose, I want it to be a soft edge. So I'm playing with hard edges and soft edges because that tip actually connects itself to the shadow of the jaw line on the left hand side of the face. So I just use a clean wet brush and paint far beyond the border of that shadow, and it kind of blends itself out. But on the right hand side of the shadow, I'm adding I want to emphasize that hard line, so I'm just dropping in more pigment. And you can see it accentuates that hard line on the bridge of the nose. I'm trying to connect all these shadows, these shapes help simplify the subject and make it more readable. And although it's a complex thing to work out, it takes a bit of practice. The actual technical painting of it is not super advanced. We're just thinking of abstract shapes, really. We've connected the eyebrow with the nose shadow, and it's going to connect into the jaw shadow later on as well. When you paint a wash like this, it always starts out, of course, very wet and uncontrollable. But as it starts to dry, you get a bit more control, and it's around about that middle area where it's damp, not heavily wet or almost dry, where you can really play with it the most and get the most control. When it's super wet, it's unpredictable, and when it's almost dry, it's very delicate and it doesn't want much interference. So around that 60 to 40% 10. Left Shadows: So I've dried that area now, or I've allowed it to dry. I didn't use the hair dryer. I can just move on to the next area without having to interfere with it for the time being. Like I said, there's so many ways or the procedure can be taken anyway you want. I didn't necessarily have to paint this nose shadow first. Maybe I could have started with this left hand shadow on the eye to begin with. I start off with a strong muted tone. It can be a muted blue, any muted color, muted purple. I'm sticking with that brown blue pairing with this particular portrait. Then adding that brown, which gets a bit more diluted as we go down the page. Defining that shadow of the bottom eyelid. I refer to my pencil line or the shadow to figure out where I want this shadow line to go. I want it obviously to connect from the eye area, curve down, connect to that nose shadow, and then eventually get down to this lip area. But I want it to be a wet on wet line. I don't want to be hard like the nose shadow because the nose shadow is a cast shadow, so it's got a very hard edge. But the shadow of the jaw and the cheek is curving against light, so it's naturally going to be softer. And we can use that to our advantage and accentuates the contrast between hard lines and soft lines, which is always a beautiful thing to do with watercolor. There is a way we could have painted it all with hard lines, but it would look too sharp, and there's a way we could have painted it with all soft lines, and it would completely change the mood. So that's something you can play with as you get a bit more advanced. 11. Left Eye: But if you're purely following along, you can experiment at your own pace. That's the beauty of Skillshare. You can follow along with any teacher's class and take what you want out of their lessons and adapt them to other teachers and then experiment with what you personally want to change to it when you feel comfortable. If you don't feel comfortable experimenting, you can just follow as directly and as similar as possible. All the features on the face, I try to simplify into easy reading shapes. I've studied basic anasomy but not enough to remember all the names. So that little curvy bit at the top of the lip, I'm not sure what the name is. I'd probably recognize it if I saw it, but all I understand from it is the general almost hourglass shape shadow it gives connecting the nose to the lip. And you draw out 100 times and you don't need to learn the name. You just recognize how that shape can vary between different people, what's similar about it, what's different about it under different lighting conditions. And eventually, you can invent or paint these things almost from your imagination. You can use a reference as a subtle guide So moving back to the eyes now, the left eye first. And the whites of the eye are never actually white, especially when the lighting conditions give it a bit of shadow. The eyes are really the stars of this portrait, things that really draw the attention in to get that glistening wetness feeling of an eye, that glossy texture. I want to include a few highlights there, the pure white, and to really make that pop, I need to add, of course, the pure black pupil. So in this particular painting, I'm purposely painting around the little highlight. So the little highlight that you see is just the white of the paper on the right hand side of the pupil. But if you've already got enough on your plate, trying to work it out, that's perfectly fine. Just paint the whole pupil black, focus on the iris, and then later on after it's dried, you could just add a small dot of white gosh to restore that highlight. That's what I do many times, too. So you could see before when we added that shading to the white of the eye, it looked a bit strong, because we're adding pure black or it's not actually black. It's very intensely concentrated, burnt sienna. It looks right black. We could also mix ultramarine in there to make it dark, too. If you look at my palette, the bottom three colors on the left, that's ultramarine blue, Elysian crimson and burnt sienna. And when they're concentrated, they're almost as dark as the black up at the top. Especially when you mix the burnt sienna with the ultramarine blue, they neutralize each other, mute themselves out to basically make a very, very dark gray, almost absolute black. 12. Lips Underlayer: So that eye is pretty much done. I don't need to try and finish it off completely before moving on because I want to make sure everything's well balanced. I'm going to start painting the other elements to get them all in line together because if I over define one area, then it'll look a bit too overdone compared to the other area. I just do it to approximate finish and if I feel like doing it up later, maybe I will. But most of the time, it's just a feeling that it feels like enough. So now that we've painted that eye and we've used the darkest darks we all use the iris. In portraits, I always try to make the iris Oh, no, the pupil, sorry. The pupil of the eye, the darkest part of the whole painting. Because that's where the most contrast is with the iris and where the attention goes. But anyway, what I was saying is now that we've established the darkest part of our painting, we can use that to reference the whole tonal scale. So I'm going to use that dark shadow for the nostrils, too, like I just did there and any other area of dark shading. And, of course, we know the highlights. We know the lightest area, the whites of the eye, the little dots of highlights on the nose as well. Now, when painting these lips, I made sure all the area around it was dry because we want the lips to basically be a clean cut out silhouette for this underlayer. And then later on, we can soften some edges consciously by choice if we need to. Of course, we don't want the lip to look just stuck on. We want it to feel three D and connected, but when adding this underlayer, we need to make sure the whole area is dry around it, and now you can see I'm softening the corner there because there's typically a little not dimples, but the corner of the lips create a kind of shadow that softly blends out. And that's what connects it to the face and visually gives it depth and freiness. So I'm messing around a bit with that corner on the right, free wetting the paper, and then dropping in some pigment to blend it out. And whilst it's about 70% dry, actually more like 60% now, I'm dropping in some thicker brownish red. It's not pure zi and cryb and there's a bit of brown in there to create some texture. 13. Lip Shadows: So now I've given that time to dry a bit. The underlayer of the lips, created a bit of texture so it's not flat. I've added a bit of drops where I can see there's a bit of darkness, a bit of lightness. I don't want them to look like completely clean perfect lips. I want there to be imperfections to make it seem real. Give it a bit of life. And then adding the form to it, the Fred is a fairly simple process. We start off with thick pigment right in the middle obviously in between, and we've got to think about how light and shadow works. So if light's coming down from the top right across the top lip blocking the light. On the left hand side in the middle, then that's where the shadow is going to be. And then on the bottom lip, it kind of curves outward. So there's not much shadow on the bottom lip at all because it faces towards the light. And that's typical with most lips because most portraits, light comes from above. So when looking at references, you'll see that the top lip is usually much darker. And again, once you paint so many portraits or even sketch them or just observe them, you start noticing these patterns. Then I even though I'm not going to paint it right now because I want to I want the lips to dry first, I consider the shadow area under the lips, where it connects the chin part of the lips. So I'm painting a little bit of it now just to remind myself. Because the lips cause that shadow that curves around the chin, and in most of my portraits, I accentuate that. I try and use that even if I don't see it in my references because it just helps makes sense of the image a bit more. It helps make sense for me when working it out, and it helps the viewer makes sense when they watch it or they're observing the painting. I'm allowing a little gap because I think it might be still a bit wet the lip there. It is. You can see how it connected and blended there. That's okay. Maybe we can create a soft transition. So at the moment, the pigment is quite strong, but I'm going to use pure water to agitate it and spread it out and connect and further extend that shadow. So in an interesting kind of way, if you look at the shadows we've painted so far, even though they're distinctly different features, they're all connected. Even if we painted it in different times, we painted the nose shadow quite a few minutes ago, first thing. But because we blended them out and connected them, they're all part of the same facial package. So to speak. They're not overlapped with hard lines. And this is something that you can take forward into so many different subjects, landscapes, still life, that ability to blend out washes to connect them with other ones later on. 14. Neck Shadows: And whilst adding that shadow around the chin and the lips, you can see how that brown is contrasting quite nicely with that blue on the jaw line on the left. So that's kind of color I'm going to go down here on the neckline. Still a bit wet, so you can see how when I'm touching it there, it's blending out. But I don't mind, actually. I want to keep some edges elusive, dropping in some blue. Again, to create that nice contrast with the brown This is one of those areas where you could quite easily define where the jaw connects with the neck or rather separates itself from the neck. I'm choosing to keep that bit a bit more elusive because it's not the center focal point. It's quite a insignificant area of the portrait, and I'm more intrigued with connecting the shadows. There's nothing wrong if you choose to define that line. In fact, some people may think it's a bit strange having a kind of weird shaped shadow there with not knowing exactly where the jaw line connects to the chin. But we're using guiding lines, so to speak, or implied lines. We might not be drawing the actual jaw line, but we're kind of implying where it goes by allowing the viewer to connect the dots themselves. And then of course, I've added that deep dark brown where the hair will be behind. She's a blonde lady, but the shadow areas will be brown. On the earth side, we can define that jaw line. I have actually added a bit of a wet and wet line on both sides. Adding a little bit more pink just under the chin area there. Because even on the light side, there'll be a bit of shadow underneath the chin area. Especially if there's hair and basically painting the shadows of the hair that we yet to paint. I don't like to keep my shadows purely cool. I'm mixing warmth and cool within them. Now I'm going to apply a thin wash going all over the left hand side of the neck. I know I already painted that little section at the top, and it's got a hard line there, but I don't think it matters at all. I can paint over it, and that line will pretty much stay there. I'm basically adding a glaze to it. A glaze is just a kind of subtle area of tone, just to help layer the piece. It's an extra layer. It's not something we could have done in one go to have that hard edge at the top and this transitional shadow coming from the bottom. Yet again, it's one of those examples where I could have easily painted this bottom wash shadow first and then gone back with that hard shadow at the top. It's very adaptable once you know the rules of watercolor. And also quite unpredictable, and that's part of the excitement with it. I, for example, weren't to know whether that hard line below the chin would disappear if I reactivate it or not. Turns out, it's quite high staining. So that means the pigment stains the paper. 15. Right Eyebrow: Now it's time to move on to the right hand side of the portrait, the right hand side features, starting with the eyebrow, I'm doing it a slightly different way to where we did the left hand side one. If you remember, on the left hand side, we used this kind of wet on wet technique to begin with. Whereas on this side, I'm kind of blocking it out straightaway on dry paper and then just softening the bottom half of it. And then following a similar kind of procedure as we did on the left. So when it comes to a feature like the eye, which, of course, has a lot of intricate little lines in details, probably more so than any other element of a portrait, I have to really break it down, and that's useful for you to see, of course, the only way I know how to do it too by breaking it down. So I look at the general washes to apply. That's what I've done now. And then as it starts to dry, I drop in tones to create the general soft changes of tones. That's what I'm doing underneath as well. You can see it's the larger shapes I'm starting with. Then we can go back and paint the folds of the eyelids and the different lines they look like. Of course, actually, they're just defined shadows. We've got some areas of skin that are facing towards the light. For example, that light strip, you can see on the left hand side. That's what I want to try and define also on the right hand side right now. The light curves up from the bottom and then there's a little light strip where suddenly there's a change in the plane of the eyelid and the hard edge is facing towards the light, so it's reflecting that light. 16. Right Eye: I've already painted the little ear duct in that little corner of the eye. But then we've got to soften out, of course, the whites of the eye because they're not pure white, much like we did on the left, you can see this time, the darkness is coming from the eye duct side rather than, of course, the outside corner because the nature of the light, it's not a pure mirror. It's not pure symmetrical. The light is different, of course, from a different side. Then the top eyelid, I think of it quite in an abstract way. I think of it as a kind of stretched out sausage that has a dark line on the bottom and the top. You can see on the left, it looks a bit like that or a worm. Of course, it's just a fold. But I'm trying to simplify it into just smooth gradients and hard lines. Painting out the pupil, like we did on the other side, and I'm looking at the pupil on the left to try and match it so that the pupil is in level. At the moment, it doesn't feel level. On the right hand side, it looks a bit too high. But we can come back to that in a bit. At the moment, I'm painting that sausage kind of worm like eyelid at the top. So by that, I mean, it looks a bit three D, so it's darker on the sides, and then in the middle, it's a bit lighter. And of course, the eyelashes. I don't really spend a lot of time painting the eyelashes, only on the corners where they curve outwards and they're concentrated. But the middle eyelashes, I only slightly indicate them, sometimes not even bothering because they can be easily overly done. And like I always do, I'm connecting that shadow from the eyelid all the way down and it helps define the curve of the cheek. Without that shadow, there won't be that sense of free D. So emphasizing these shadows, even if they don't actually exist, just understanding how the curvature of anatomy generally goes makes it a bit more believable. And of course, this is the shadow from the hair we'll be painting later on. So we don't have to make it that loyal or accurate. We don't have to feel like a slave to it. I don't have to think that I need to now paint a strand of hair that matches this shadow. It's too subtle for that. So we can kind of invent our own hair later on. Notice how inside most of these shadows, when there's a shadow area, I keep it wet on wet inside. I rarely have hard lines inside a shadow. It's almost like the shadow areas force everything to melt. And then everything outside the shadow is quite hard edged. That's what I try and think of in my mind when I'm painting. If it's a shadow, it's blending and melting and moving and the watercolor is doing its magic. Everything outside of a shadow is usually much sharper naturally because the light is causing sharper shadows. More details are seen. It's less elusive. Even the details seen in these eyelids, it seems like the most intricate part, but they're actually very abstract. They're just curved lines compressed together. They're not that accurate actually. They just seem to visually make sense. 17. Painting The Shoulder: Notice how the nostrils aren't exactly symmetrical again because the lighting conditions are different on each side, so it affects the way they look. So they might feel wrong when you're painting them, but if you end result because we're looking at the portrait as a whole, it still feels quite cohesive. Now painting this shoulder area. I've added a drop of brown at the top and transitioning it out into the rest. However, I want this blue reflection. I think it's a blue reflection. I'm imagining how light can catch. It's almost like a highlight on the tip of the shoulder. There's some secondary blue light source. I'm imagining on the left, adding that blue glow. I don't know whether you can say a blue glow. I guess you can because glow you assume with warmth, but cool colors don't necessarily glow, but that's what I'm imagining. Instead of adding a warm glow, I'm adding this cool glow to give you a kind of bizarre kind of feel a unique kind of feeling that kind of is not necessarily unsettling, but it's kind of abstract. But through my eyes, it somehow makes sense. I'm again, trying to combine hard edges with soft edges here. So we've got the soft edges on the left, as you can see, and then on this right hand side, I'm playing around with some abstract shadow marks here. And I'll later incorporate this section into the abstract kind of element that we're going to infuse. So everything so far has been quite controlled or at least representational. We're trying to convey a clear face with understandable features. But now we're kind of getting to abstract area where lines don't necessarily follow the laws of physics. We're just purely painting for experimentation, feeling, expression. A 18. Abstract Underlayer: Now I'm using the tip of my brush. I'm not using a small brush, as you can see, but these brushes have very fine tips, and I'm just painting a few wispy shadows from the hairs. I'm doing this even before we paint the hair themselves. These subtle little touches that aren't technically difficult to do, but they ground it and add quite a bit of realism to it because we've got so many big broad washes going on, and this is the polar opposite to big broad washes. We're using long thin lines another idea of contrast because we often think of contrast in its most simplest form of dark versus light. We think of contrast in terms of tone, but there's so many different ways we can think of contrast, thin brush strokes, contrasting with large big washes, cool colors like this blue contrasting with whole warmth of her face. So some of this area is wet and some of it's dry. And that's what creates this unpredictable mark making. We're venturing into the unknown here. I'm being very impulsive. I'm not knowing where it's going to go exactly. I've got a few pencil lines to work out where I want the visual weight to be. I know that on the right hand side, in the background, I want there to be a big blue splash that connects with this blueness here, and then the hair on the left will be very abstract but using the blond hair color, the yellow ochre color. So big wet splats here. To get good splats, you really have to obviously overload the brush. If your brush isn't fully saturated with water, you really have to flick hard and that becomes quite difficult to control your splats. They go where you don't want them to go. So really scoop up as much water so that they're already dripping off the brush before you splat. The brushes that I'm using now are synthetic and actually, they're not ideal for splats. If you really want to get the best splats, use a very soft brush where the hairs are very flexible and inclined to just flick off the water. This brush, you can see, it's got a bit more resistance and it's not ideal actually. But I'm taking the risk anyway. I have a tissue in my other hand off camera, obviously, ready to pick up any splashes where I don't want them to go. Starting with that burn, not burnt sienna, starting with the serlean blue, and then combining this yellow ochre, which will transition into the hair above. Dropping some of the pigment so that there's a kind of organic natural transition going on. This is, of course, just the underlayer. 19. Abstract Hair: So we've started to play around with abstract marks. It's quite light to begin with. I'll definitely go over it again later with a much bolder mark, but I'm just setting the mood to begin with. I want you to counterbalance that abstract side with this abstract side here. I start off with splats, but then manually kind of drop in and make my own dots where I think they'll look aesthetically pleasing. I always find splats help with that illusion of death because it's almost like they are particles in the air, and these particles are the same size, but they look smaller because they're either closer to you or further away. Of course, I'd have no clue what particles these could ever be in reality. So it's completely imagination. They don't actually exist. Purely for expressive purposes. You don't have to add splats either. Some people prefer not to. Oh it's a strange element to watercolor because splats when I first started painting, I always associated it almost with children's paintings like messy for the sake of it. But actually, when it actually came down to applying splats in my own artworks consciously, I realize how difficult it is to actually get them right. And sometimes even now, I feel like I don't fully have control of where they go or how they look. And it took a lot of time actually experimenting on blank sheets of paper, cheap paper, just to figure out how to get the splats the exact size that I want and how to aim them properly and get the consistency of the paint right with them. And this brush that I'm using right now is going to change to a different brush now. The hairs on them are very light and flexible, and that's one of the main things to improve on splats. So now we've started the hair Osle and I'm using a yellow ochre, but yellow ochre by itself looks a bit too artificial. So a few drops of burnt sienna in there can give it a bit more interest, get a bit more dynamic. But also adding now a little bit of neutral tint or black. Actually makes it a bit more realistic because, of course, when we think of blonde hair and what color we instantly go to, of course, it's yellow ochre or cadmium yellow. But in reality, when you actually look at the real color of the hair, natural blondes not pure yellow. It's actually quite ash like. I'm adding these muted tones in there to give it a bit more realism. Down at the bottom, I'm being quite bold with the burnt sienna. And then applying the serlem blue into that brown to again get more elements of that blue distributed around the portrait. Being very bold with this black now. I'm thinking in terms of big shapes, even with the hair. Of course, hair is made up with thousands of different strands of hair, but you still have to break it down into big shapes to begin with, and then break it down as you get deeper and deeper into it. It looks very bold to begin with, but this black, once it's dried, it'll lighten up significantly. I don't want to use blue for the main shadow areas because that will make it green obviously with the yellow ochre. Oh 20. Hair Washes: But blue is perfectly fine to mix with the burnt sienna. It's just the yellow oka areas that I'm trying to avoid that kind of green outcome. Now, I've changed over to this weird sword brush, I think it's called or rigor brush that I found, which has a very fine tip, and this is where we can add a few of those tiny little strands, and it creates the whole illusion that all the hair is strands. Just a few little edges that come out. These sharp little lines tricks the eye into thinking the whole thing comes from that when of course, it's not. H. I could, of course, use the tip of my other brush, but this particular brush allows me to be a bit more expressive because even if I apply a lot of pressure, it's still a very fine tip. With the other brushes, the regular brush that I use, although it has the ability for a very fine tip, you have to apply light pressure to achieve that. With this one, the brush bends with pressure and it still achieves a sharp tip. The only issue with this brush is it runs out of water very quick because it's very thin. O. On the right hand side, I obviously decided to start with the thin strands to begin with. But I know that I'm going to go back in with bold washes afterwards to connect them. That's why I'm not using this brush in the main area. Now I can go back and use that similar blond color, that kind of muted yellow ochre. I'm allowing some whites of the paper as well to remain. Although it is nice to keep the white of the paper when you can, it can be difficult to do it in a nice natural organic way without it looking forced. So if I happen to overpaint and get rid of more white than I ideally like, I know I have my white gouache to come back at the end with full control as to where it can go later. You can see on the left above the eyebrow, the hair area, I've reserved some white of the paper there too. But even then that looks a bit too it looks real and organic, but it looks a bit too thick for it to be a highlight. I might have to mess around with that a bit later. Or maybe not. Maybe once I disconnect from the painting, I can accept it for what it is, and it turns out because it is more organic, more natural, it captures that essence better than if I were to force it into more realism and happen to lose its spirit in the way. Although whilst painting it, I feel there's a mistake there. I learned to accept the process a bit more, allow watercolor to do its thing, disconnect from it for a while and come back with fresh eyes and usually, I'm glad I did do that and not overwork it. Because even for advanced painters, it's easy to trick yourself with these things. On this right hand side, it's going to be less bold because there's less shadows as where the lights coming from. But I still want to be broad with my brush marks just not as dark or contrasted. 21. Adjusting The Tones: Now that this wash on the left hand side is about 80% dry, I'm dropping pure water in there to agitate it and create fun little spontaneous textures that I wouldn't be able to do consciously or manually. It's something I have to rely on watercolor to do for me. That's part of the fun. I don't exactly know how it's going to go, but hopefully it'll create that classic ethereal look of watercolor that creates the feeling like it was meant to be even though I had no control in actually doing it, just purely manipulating it or hoping for the best really. I have an idea about how I want it to be, and I also have some kind of knowledge or idea about how to achieve it, but at the same time, watercolor can be unpredictable and deceiving. There's been so many times when I thought, I've really got the grip of this watercolor thing, and I think I know exactly what I'm doing. And then for some reason, it just doesn't end up that way. And then there's times when I try something overly ambitious and I reach a point where I'm stumped and I just don't know what I meant to do or how to go forward, but I just take the leap and go with it, and then somehow watercolor does it for me and figures out a way beyond my conscious control and surprises me in a good way. So that's really what I love about watercolor, how each painting has its almost soul. Has its own way of interacting with you. Or at least that's what I tell myself to make it more interesting, to make the journey more exciting. 22. Some Dry Brush Marks: Now I'm going to add a bit more shadows to the hair. I've got rid of that rigor brush and go back to my regular brush. Trying to figure out a general pattern to the hair, where the curves can clump together where there's little shadows hidden beneath. I'm not going to paint the ear on this side because it's going to be covered by hair conveniently. I can spend more time painting a section like this, trying to make it look right than some of the detailed areas like the eyes, only to realize it looks too forced and then scrub it out or paint over it in a broad way afterwards. I find these little areas the most challenging part of a portrait, actually. The eyes, I can break down because I've practiced it so many times on different subjects. I kind of understand the kind of general pattern of eyes and how to break it down. But the hair in its weird kind of pattern, it's difficult to break down into a believable form that's not too distracting, not too abstract, but not too detailed. Now, I'm trying to use some dry brush marks because dry brush marks add a bit more texture and they can imply more detail. Because at the moment, the main body of the hair is quite a simple wash. So adding a few dry brush marks can give the appearance of more textured hair, especially when we need to imply a bit more shadow and depth and volume. It's important to add this shadow section here where the top of the forehead meets the hair because there's a big fold of hair coming down, leaving a strong shadow underneath, giving that feeling of depth. It's shadows that give depth and three dimensionality to it, that illusion of free D. So I try to accentuate where I can see those shadows. Because the skin totins themselves are quite flat. That first wash we went over the whole of the face and the shoulders with a flat wash. So it's really the shadows that define the whole thing. 23. Playful Abstracts: Now it's time to be playful again, and I'm using a hard line to begin with to kind of map out where that shoulder ends. That's what I'm going for at the moment. I might play around with that edge later. We already did that light expressive area to begin with. Now I'm going to be a bit bolder. And it can feel a bit weird doing this. We've spent all this time so far defining the face, the hair, making everything kind of organized and detailed. And now we might risk it with a few abstract marks at the end. So a lot of these abstract marks that I'm doing come from practice as well on blank sleets of paper where the stakes are low. Cheap pieces of paper that is not even watercolor paper, office paper. Just to mess around with brush strokes, mark making, trying to find an aesthetic way to use your brushes in a way that isn't representational, if that makes sense, you're not trying to convey an actual subject. You're trying to create something visually exciting just using marks, shapes, directions, and once you know how to do that, then it actually helps you when you paint the detailed things, you have more control. So I am being spontaneous and I'm not really knowing where I'm going as I'm doing it. It's more of a feeling, but it's a kind of learnt practice with a feeling. So I definitely feel the pressure to get these abstract marks right. But at the same time, they're not the center of attention either. So we can always fall back and relax a bit with that idea, too. These abstract marks aren't meant to be super loud. They're meant to compliment what's going on in the eyes, the nose, the mouth. Because the human eye is automatically drawn to things we understand, and you look at the clouds and we can imagine faces in them anyway, we can detect faces very well. So that's what our eyes are naturally drawn to. These abstract marks as loud as they are, kind of almost obnoxious as they are, they don't steal the attention away from those blue eyes staring at you. Of course, the blueness and the eyes unnaturally blue. They're purposely accentuated like my snow leopard class. There's a lot of abstract marks in my snow leopard class, but it's the eyes that kind of ground everything and make sense of the whole piece. For the ear, I'm basically muting it down all the way in shadow, just adding a little light tone where the curve of the inside of the ear would be. But I might even make that darker. This ear is one of the areas where I don't want any observer to look at. I don't want it to call for any attention, but I have to paint it because it's there, so it's keeping it as quiet and subtle as possible. 24. Restoring Highlights: Now I've dried the whole painting, and I'm going back with some highlights. In the hair to really make it pop. Because like I said before, although in an ideal world, it'd be nice to preserve the light of the paper as we're painting it, you just can't realistically achieve exciting expressive marks whilst also preserving very defined highlights like this. So I don't consider it cheating at all to use some light opaic paint like this white or even you can see in my palette, it's called Quam E two, I think. You can check the resource section to see which colors that I've got and which I use these highlights just emphasize that direction of the hair ground some of the chaos. I'm not going absolutely crazy with them. A bit of texture there. Dry brush marks. And I now know that I'm about 99% done with a painting. And if I were to actually finish it right now, not many people would notice that much difference. So I'm in that territory where I need to think, what is actually essential? I know there's no big elements. There's no big shadow on the cheek that I need to correct. So I'm coming to an area where I think I might disconnect it for a couple of hours and come back with fresh eyes because there could well be a shadow on the forehead that I think needs refining, but I'm so used to looking at this painting for the last hour and a half or 2 hours that I can't see objectively what is essential. So it's a wise idea to disconnect for a while. Because all these strands that I'm painting now aren't actually that necessary. It's more I'm just kind of satisfying my curiosity rather than what's actually essential. There's a feeling to try and get everything perfect and it's not so black and white. You transition into this area. I start doing some things that I might regret like splatting pure white and then having to use a tissue to blotch it out afterwards. Although some of these white spots are quite nice in the hair area, as long as they don't land on the face. And as long as they're very subtle. So I'll disconnect for it for maybe a day or maybe just a couple of hours or even after a cup of tea and then come back to see how it looks. But that's pretty much done. 25. Final Thoughts: Welcome back and congratulations on completing this watercolor class of combining portraiture with abstraction. We looked at how realism can be concentrated around the most important features while surrounding areas remain loose, open, and suggestive. Strong eyes, carefully placed shadows, and a few clear facial edges gave the portrait identity, while strains, drips, sweeping brushwork and untouched paper can add movement and atmosphere. Contrast between warm natural tones and cool turquoise also helped connect the figure with the abstract design. Remember, watercolor painting is not just about technical skills, but also about expressing your creativity and personal style. I encourage you to continue exploring, experimenting and pushing your boundaries to create your own unique watercolor masterpieces. As we come to the end of this class, I hope you feel more confident and comfortable with your watercolor painting abilities. Practice is key when it comes to improving your skills, so keep on painting and experimenting. I want to express my gratitude for each and every one of you. Your passion for watercolor painting is so inspiring and I'm honored to be your teacher. If you would like feedback on your painting, I'd love to give it. So please share your painting in the student projects gallery down below, and I'll be sure to respond. If you prefer, you can share it on Instagram, tagging me at Will Elliston, as I would love to see it. Skillshare also loves seeing my students work, so tag them as well at Skillshare. After putting so much effort into it, why not share your creation? If you have any questions or comments about today's class or want any specific advice related to watercolor, please reach out to me in the discussion section. You can also let me know about any subject wildlife or scene you'd like me to do a class on. If you found this class useful, I'd really appreciate getting your feedback on it. Reading your reviews fills my heart with joy and helps me create the best experience for my students. Lastly, please click the follow button Utop so you can follow me on Skillshare. This means that you'll be the first to know when I launch a new class or post giveaways. I hope this class encourages you to be more selective with detail and more adventurous with expression. I look forward to seeing you all in future classes until then, bye for now and Happy painting.